Any cryptocurrency other than bitcoin is referred to as an altcoin. Remember, you should treat cryptocurrencies as if you were a VC looking to invest in a startup. You’d invest in the startup that would have the greatest chance of succeeding because it provides a unique benefit to the world that will continue to be useful in the long run. The main wallet i’m using to invest in altcoins is CoinSpot because it gives me the option of purchasing a plethora of cryptocurrencies from just one account.
Bitcoin has forced itself to become an investment; the severe volatility its value goes through on a daily and even hourly basis makes it much harder to use as currency. By the time a bitcoin transaction is complete, it could be worth less than it was when you first tried to use it. That has made it seem more viable as an investment than as a currency to many, but investment analysts remain wary of bitcoin still.
In the simplest terms, a futures contract (or a future) is an agreement to buy or sell a certain product on a fixed date. Futures are used as both an instrument for mitigating risks associated with price volatility of vital commodities, and as a tradable derivative product. A comprehensive Cointelegraph primer timed to the launch of the first regulated BTC futures last December is still there for anyone in need to recapitulate the essentials.
The ICON technology (ICX) is incredibly exciting because it aims to harbor the single largest decentralized global network. It aims to provide its users a certain degree of connectivity between countries and cultures around the world that’s currently just not possible or non-existent. This network gives way to businesses and individuals to communicate, transfer, deposit, and in many different ways cooperate with each other in a never seen before way. ICON shows extraordinary potential for the future, but it’s already boasting a large community made of reputable security institutions, banks, hospitals, insurances, universities and institutions in many other sectors. Crucially, ICON is NOT yet tradable in South Korea – when that changes I expect this coin to moon.

Unfortunately, the FDIC is just as dramatically underfunded as banks are. As the FDIC itself acknowledges, it holds enough money to cover just over 1% of all the deposits it insures. In other words, if banks reneged on any more than 1% of all their deposits, the FDIC itself would also fail, and everyone would yet again be left in the dust without recourse.

Update 1st October 2018: The cryptocurrency market has been volatile as ever over the last 6 months. Unless you are a skilled trader, it is harder to make money in a bear market than in a bull market – and we have been in a bear market for some time now. Personally, I have stopped trading and I am now focussing on growing my portfolio passively using a cryptocurrency trading bot – you can find out more about this here. If you are new to crypto, read on!

You should look for projects that have good long-term fundamentals. Assessing a project based on its vision, the problems it is trying to solve and the quality of its developing team is vital in understanding whether the project has great prospects. Good projects will tend to achieve their objectives and deliverables, which will, in turn, be reflected in an appreciation of their token’s price over the long-term. (See more: Coins, Tokens & Altcoins: What’s the Difference?)
NEW YORK, Oct. 25, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Grayscale Investments, LLC, the sponsor (the "Sponsor") of the Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTCQX:GBTC) (the "Trust"), announced today that it has requested withdrawal of its Registration Statement on Form S-1 (File No. 333-215627) that was initially filed on January 20, 2017 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed public offering of its shares. The Registration Statement has not been declared effective, and no securities have been sold in connection with the offering described in the Registration Statement. Withdrawal of the Registration Statement does not impact quotation of the Trust's shares on the OTCQX.
If you’re aware of the risks and still willing to take the plunge, this is what you need to know about investing in bitcoin: Cryptocurrencies exist in an unregulated, decentralized digital sphere without involvement by (or protection via) a central bank. This is part of bitcoin’s appeal. People or entities can buy and sell cryptocurrency anonymously, and there are fewer middlemen taking a cut of transactions. But it also means you can’t just buy bitcoin via mainstream investing tools like a brokerage account.
I would venture to say that most people have far more confidence in their ability to predict short term market movements than is actually the case. I’ve seen plenty of instances of people who have thought that they could capitalize on short term volatility on the way up, and essentially ‘buy the dips and sell the tips’, and in every single instance I can recall, this strategy eventually fails, and often in a big way. At face value, this seems to make sense. If you think you can time when the dips will occur and when they will end, and similarly when the peaks will occur and when those will end, you can definitely make more profit along the way by selling high and buying low.
NEW YORK, Nov. 22, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Grayscale Investments, LLC, the sponsor (the "Sponsor") of the Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTCQX: GBTC) (the "Trust"), announced that it has today declared a distribution and established a record date for the distribution of a portion of the rights to Bitcoin Gold tokens currently held by the Trust as a result of the fork in the Bitcoin blockchain on October 24, 2017 to shareholders of record ("Record Date Shareholders") as of the close of business on December 4, 2017 (the "Record Date").

Shockingly, this is actually how banks work in reality. In the United States, the reserve requirement, or the percentage of net deposits banks are actually required to keep in liquid financial instruments on hand, is generally 10% for most banks. This means that if a bank has net deposits of a billion dollars, it needs to only keep 100 million on hand at any given time.

This is especially true given the number of new cryptocurrencies that have entered the market. There is no industry that is targeted by only one cryptocurrency, and even if you manage to find such an industry, new players will likely surface. IOTA was the crypto that didn’t use blockchain; now there’s Nano, Circle, and Hashgraph. Ripple was the crypto for banks; now there’s Stellar slowly eating away at Ripple’s first mover advantage.

While we invest at every stage, we believe the best returns lie at the earliest stage, where deal flow is critical. To be successful at an early stage we believe a fund needs to be able to add value to those teams via feedback on their protocol design, access to a broader pool of investors, and help attracting partnerships and engineers. We believe our disciplined long-term investment approach combined with our attractiveness to early protocol development teams will be a part of our unfair advantage.
Decide on a profit-taking strategy. When will you take profits? And how much will you sell? I’ve divided my holdings into low risk (Bitcoin), medium risk (platform), and high risk (utility). For every category, you decide on a profit/sell schedule. This can be: when a high-risk investment rises 20%, you sell 5%, or if you want to take more risk, when it rises 50% you sell 10%. Be realistic and commit yourself to your created schedule.
Since their triumphant advent in the wake of the December 2017 bull run, Bitcoin futures seem to have occupied an oddly fixed position in the minds of many cryptocurrency buffs. A popular view among those who follow the dynamics of the crypto world rests on a set of established points about BTC futures: they exist since late 2017; they are offered by Cboe and CME, two respectable regulated exchanges; they help manage investment risks and as such are supposed to draw institutional money into the crypto space, mitigating price volatility and lending credence to the underlying asset.
One other important mistake that beginner crypto investors make is greed, which can be boiled down to a lack of diversification of investment streams and an assumption that the market will behave in a predictable way. Many well-known investors and entrepreneurs strongly vocalize their opinion that diversifying investments leads to less impressive returns. While this is true in traditional investment channels, which is what these specific opinions are referring to, it is not true in the cryptocurrency market.
It is important to note that some altcoins innovate by experimenting with useful characteristics Bitcoin does not offer. For instance, Ripple serves as a protocol users can employ to make inter-currency payments with ease, BitShares describes itself as “a fair version of Wall Street,” and Darkcoin hopes to provide a platform for completely anonymous transactions. Some altcoin ecosystems, such as Mastercoin and CounterParty, even utilize the Bitcoin blockchain to secure their platform.
That’s the case as I see it for bitcoin. In the case of most altcoins, however, I don’t see remotely enough to even begin to justify the possibility of long term gain in the first place. Even with speculations, or perhaps especially with speculations, it’s incredibly important to thoroughly analyze a given investment opportunity for at least the potential for long term gain and success, and assess the magnitude of that possible gain, and then to weigh that potential versus the likelihood of outright failure of the speculation. With most altcoins, their value over bitcoin or ethereum is far from clear, and generally superficial or minor at best.
Also in March, it suddenly emerged that the abovementioned startup Crypto Facilities has been offering futures contracts tied to Ripple’s XRP token since October 2016, without much publicity, for some reason. On May 11, Crypto Facilities exploded another bombshell in the crypto space, revealing ETH/USD futures as their latest offering. And to crown it all, in June the same company unveiled the first regulated Litecoin futures.
You would have heard of Bitcoin and the ‘altcoins.’ How this naming convention started was because back in the days of 2011, forks of Bitcoin appeared in the markets. The forks, or clones, each aspire to serve a niche area, aiming to be ‘better’ than Bitcoin. Since then countless new crypto has emerged, eroding away Bitcoin’s crypto market cap dominance. These altcoins are gaining market share at an alarming speed. Ten times or more growth has been observed in a time span as short as six weeks (see PIVX, an altcoin).
NOTE: The image below shows daily candles on a 1 year BTC chart. When the short term 12 day exponential moving average crossed under the longer term 26 day in January 2018, it pretty clearly marked the start of a bear market in retrospect (a true correction, not just “a dip”). You can see that buying the dip and holding in this time was not ideal (not the worst move perhaps long term, and not a bad move for short term trades, just not ideal for a buy and hold strategy as far as we know so far). That overarching bear market is an example of a market in which one has to apply a bit more nuance to their “buy the dips” strategy.

A rising trend in the world of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin ATMs allow users to purchase Bitcoin with cash through machines that work almost identically to standard ATMs. With over 3,000 Bitcoin ATMs scattered across the world (primarily in large metro areas throughout North America and Europe), you can use search tools such as Google Maps or Bitcoin ATM Radar to find one close. Just remember that while Bitcoin ATMs have low processing fees, they also have a low buying limit.

For me, security tokens are too risky at the moment – take, for example, the SEC’s recent witch hunt, during which it subpoenaed 80 cryptocurrency companies. However, the tokenized model of securities has the potential to severely disrupt current fundraising and shareholding models. Once global regulatory bodies have created a clear regulatory framework to reduce their risk, investing in security tokens will become a highly attractive option.
As the tech literacy of the population increases, acceptance of crypto as a legitimate store of value follows, and it boomed. Titles along the lines of ‘Bitcoin price hits new all-time high’ and ‘Ethereum price surges’ are starting to perforate the general public’s news feed. What we know for sure is that people who were once skeptical of Bitcoin and the technology behind it are slowly understanding and getting increasingly involved with crypto. As at the time of writing, the market cap of the entire crypto space is at 30.9 billion USD. It was 20 billion just four months ago. What would it be four months from now?
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Zcash is a crypto that aims to solve the same issues Monero does. Zcash leverages zero-knowledge proof constructions called zk-SNARKs. These constructions allow two users to exchange information without revealing their identities. The bitcoin blockchain contains records of the participants in a transaction, as well as the amount involved. On the other hand, Zcash’s blockchain shows only that a transaction took place, not who was involved or what the amount was.
Great to get an update on this new asset class. I think any of us who ignore or dismiss cryptos are potentially missing a huge opportunity. As Dan says the risk reward is assymetric so why would anybody with a pragmatic attitude to investment not have at least a minimal exposure? Unfortunately too many people are happy to buy the negative propoganda of yesterday's winners like Jamie Dimon and Charlie Munger for whom the answer to the question of will bitcoin go to zero or a million will never matter! For most of the rest of us, we want to listen to the pros and cons of the narrative. Thanks RVTV for giving this important new asset class airtime. I would welcome more informative videos like this on cryptos.
The futures markets are characterized by the ability to use very high leverage relative to stock markets. Futures can be used to hedge or speculate on the price movement of the underlying asset. For example, a producer of corn could use futures to lock in a certain price and reduce risk, or anybody could speculate on the price movement of corn by going long or short using futures.
With the advent of smart contracts made possible by the blockchain, however, this is (soon-to-be) a thing of the past. One can create a simple smart contract at effectively almost no cost that specifies in code that each party will send it $100 in bitcoin, and that upon the completion of the election process, it will either send all $200 to the party that bet on Donald Trump winning the election, or send the $200 to the party that bet on him losing the election. No ifs, ands, or buts. The code is clear, objective, and deterministic. Either the contract is fulfilled in one direction, or it is fulfilled in the other. No need to trust the other party in the bet at all, much less a third party to mediate.
With this strategy, I’ve been trying to build a systematic approach to buying low and selling high that will continuously increase the value of my portfolio. It rides the big waves of the crypto market in a relaxed way. Don’t try to predict anything, but just go with the flow. Also, don’t sweat the small movements. The market is incredibly volatile, and the sooner you accept this and learn to ignore it, the better.
These are just a few of countless twists and turns and vicissitudes our much vaunted (and much derided) bitcoin will have to endure before its long journey comes to an end, either six feet under or as an indelible fixture in our global economy. There’s no telling which way it will go, and one must come to one’s own conclusion on how much faith and conviction one chooses to place in bitcoin.
If we apply this to cryptocurrency, we can draw some parallels between the traditional markets and the cryptocurrency market. One would typically regard Bitcoin as being less risky than an unknown altcoin. From this, we can then tailor our level of exposure to suit our risk appetite. For example, a very risky portfolio might be 80% in small-cap cryptocurrency and 20% in Bitcoin. Using the information we have gathered so far, we can now construct our own long-term portfolio.
The market is so volatile that big movements up and down are pretty common and you can capitalise on this through swing trading. I recommend choosing a group of coins to be in and then sticking to swing trading in those coins rather than jumping constantly between different cryptocurrencies – it does help to have an understanding of what different coins do and how much volatility can be expected and you will gain that understanding with time. Good luck!
Gold, on the other hand, doesn’t inflate like fiat currencies do. That’s because there’s an intrinsically limited supply, and consequently, things tend to cost the same in gold over long periods of time. In fact, 2,000 years ago, Roman centurions were paid about 38.58 ounces of gold. In US dollars today, this comes out to about $48,350. The base salary of a captain in the US army today comes out to just about the same at $48,500.
If you want to trade in cryptocurrencies, you’re going to need a platform on which to trade them, and an intermediary to communicate within the network of traders. Most of us lack the technological inclination or means to mine Bitcoin directly, or communicate and trade with miners directly, or store our digital currencies and assets. That’s where Coinbase comes in.
When those mortgages were defaulted on, the artificially inflated values of the homes began to collapse, and banks were left holding assets worth far less than the amount they had lent out. As a consequence, they now had nowhere near the amount of money that customers had given them, and began experiencing liquidity crises that led to their ultimate bankruptcy and demise.
More recently, the approval or rejection of a bitcoin ETF was widely touted as being the contributing factor to a bitcoin bull run from under $1000 to over $1200. It was speculated that if the ETF were to be rejected, that naturally the price would fall to where it was before the bull run began. Indeed, the moment the ETF was announced as rejected, the price did momentarily fall to almost $1000. However, it just as quickly recovered, and began an inexorable climb all the way up to over $2700, where it stands to this day.
Second: Investment in cryptocurrency isn’t something to be taken lightly. It’s extremely risky, extremely speculative, and extremely early stage still at this point in time. Countless speculators and day traders have lost their entire fortunes trading cryptocurrency. I was no different when I first started investing in crypto. The first $5000 I put into crypto fell almost immediately to less than $500 — a net loss of over 90%.
The biggest risk when investing and trading is you: your emotions, biases, and beliefs. This strategy tries to remove the “you” as much as possible from the equation. This article accurately depicts the biases and shortcomings we all have. The markets are not rational; almost everyone lets their emotions (such as FOMO and panic-selling) get the best of them. In the end, big money will always beat you if you don’t come to terms with these cold hard truths.
This is the method i’m predominantly using and involves trading bitcoin through a company called USI TECH. The idea here is simple. You lend out bitcoins to USI and they return you on average 1% of what you’ve given them every day for 140 business days. E.g. If you start with 1 bitcoin, after 140 business days you should have close to 1.4 btc simple enough right?
As the tech literacy of the population increases, acceptance of crypto as a legitimate store of value follows, and it boomed. Titles along the lines of ‘Bitcoin price hits new all-time high’ and ‘Ethereum price surges’ are starting to perforate the general public’s news feed. What we know for sure is that people who were once skeptical of Bitcoin and the technology behind it are slowly understanding and getting increasingly involved with crypto. As at the time of writing, the market cap of the entire crypto space is at 30.9 billion USD. It was 20 billion just four months ago. What would it be four months from now?

This illustrates even more vividly why it’s incredibly dangerous to invest in anything you don’t actually believe in, and aren’t willing to hold, long term. If you aren’t going to hold something long term, then generally you must believe that while the price will rise in the short term, it will not continue to rise in the long term. If you hold this belief, it generally means that there’s some reason that you believe what you are investing in won’t hold true value long term, but that there is enough speculative mania in the short term to make the price go up anyway. The thinking goes that if this is going to be true, you might as well profit from this speculative mania and buy in now, wait for a little bit for the price to rise, and then sell it for short term profit.

TEAM: The CEO is the creator of JavaScript as well as co-founder of Firefox and Mozilla. They brought on board a lot of people with proven track record. I personally invest on people before anything else, and this has made it a no brainer. PRODUCT: Already there, Braver Browser is awesome – I personally use it since 2 months ago and loving it for its speed and ads blocking features.
A select few cryptocurrencies out of the thousands will survive and be adopted mainstream just as there are a select few currencies that are used by the majority of the world. However, the main crypto currencies won’t be determined by economic power but by the unique value and benefits that they provide. e.g. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency however, it is built on a platform that allows developers to create smart contracts and decentralised apps on the blockchain. This unique and useful feature of Ethereum gives it a strong chance of surviving in the long run.
A cryptocurrency that aspires to become part of the mainstream financial system may have to satisfy widely divergent criteria. It would need to be mathematically complex (to avoid fraud and hacker attacks) but easy for consumers to understand; decentralized but with adequate consumer safeguards and protection; and preserve user anonymity without being a conduit for tax evasion, money laundering and other nefarious activities. Since these are formidable criteria to satisfy, is it possible that the most popular cryptocurrency in a few years’ time could have attributes that fall in between heavily-regulated fiat currencies and today’s cryptocurrencies? While that possibility looks remote, there is little doubt that as the leading cryptocurrency at present, Bitcoin’s success (or lack thereof) in dealing with the challenges it faces may determine the fortunes of other cryptocurrencies in the years ahead.
Stratis also recently announced its “Breeze Wallet”. This is a specialist wallet that aims to increase the privacy of both Bitcoin and Stratis platform users. This Bitcoin wallet will have Tumblebit built in, which is an incredible deal and will raise awareness of Stratis tenfold. This will likely trigger a price hike. Read our in-depth article on Stratis coin here.

This portfolio gives us diversified exposure to more exotic cryptocurrency projects with higher risk / reward profiles, whilst holding the majority of our funds in a core large cap position. In a down market, we would expect this portfolio to perform worse than our conservative one. However, we expect a superior performance if the cryptocurrency market goes on a bull run.

In the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, over 1,000 of the 3,200 savings and loan institutions in the United States failed in rapid succession. The FSLIC almost immediately became insolvent itself, and had to be recapitalized several times with over $25 billion dollars of taxpayer money. Even this didn’t even come close to being sufficient to solve the crisis, and the FSLIC managed to only resolve the failure of less than 300 of the 1000 bankrupt institutions, even with all the handouts from taxpayers, before it just flat out gave up and dissolved itself.

Second: Investment in cryptocurrency isn’t something to be taken lightly. It’s extremely risky, extremely speculative, and extremely early stage still at this point in time. Countless speculators and day traders have lost their entire fortunes trading cryptocurrency. I was no different when I first started investing in crypto. The first $5000 I put into crypto fell almost immediately to less than $500 — a net loss of over 90%.
On June 26, the SEC revealed a proposal to ease the approval process and “modernize the regulatory framework for exchange-traded funds.” Most notably, the proposal stated that the “cost and delay of obtaining an exemptive order” during application would be eliminated, lowering the market barrier to entry for innovative new ETFs backed by cryptocurrencies.

No. 1: U.S. regulators recently have been constructive about crypto: Regulators across the world have realized that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. Still, there are numerous issues to negotiate: 1) Identifying players who have been defrauding investors with phony initial coin offerings (ICOs). 2) Defining the differences between utility tokens and security tokens; 3) Working with crypto businesses to create appropriate regulations to protect investors without hurting innovation. Overall, the industry and regulators are heading in the right direction, though it could take a few more years before they develop common standards.